[GTALUG] Enlarging /boot

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 06:07:58PM -0400, Bob Jonkman via talk wrote:
> Hm. I have plenty of computers where the disks have one RAID partition, and
> the RAID volume has only LVM on it, with either a separate LV=boot or just
> booting from LV=/  This has worked since at least GRUB2 came out.
> 
> I also have a single-disk (no RAID) computer where one of the partitions is
> LVM booting straight from the LVM with LILO. Another partition is WinXP.
> Yes, this is an old system, but shows that booting from an LV without a
> separate /boot partition has been possible for a long time.
> 
> The only time I've found it necessary to have a separate /boot partition is
> when the rest of the drive is encrypted. There needs to be some unencrypted
> software to decrypt the drive, available in initramfs in the unencrypted
> /boot partition.
> 
> But to address William's problem of an overfull /boot partition: I have
> sometimes rescued a system by just deleting the oldest kernel images to free
> up space in boot (or / ) with a rescue CD or USB stick, allowing the system
> to boot again to fix up the slightly broken repository (usually by
> re-installing the most recent kernel update that overflowed /boot in the
> first place).

Well lilo could boot from anything as long as it could learn the block
locations of the files it needed.  Of course sometimes those blocks
changed and lilo broke.  Quite fragile.

grub2 does have lvm support so yes it should be able to boot without
a /boot partition these days.  I don't think grub2 had that initially,
but has had it quite a while.  I think any system I have with LVM still
has a separate /boot though.

-- 
Len Sorensen